Jennifer Szalai

Earlier this year, a New York Times Magazine profile of the showrunner Shonda Rhimes (“Scandal,” “Grey’s Anatomy”) included a line that made me think she was even more than the talented and savvy TV writer she’s already shown herself to be: “Rhimes observes that people, even the ones who like ‘Scandal,’ describe it as ‘ridiculous,’ which she can live with, or a ‘guilty pleasure,’ which she ardently despises.” I despise it, too. If there’s a contemporary idiom that puzzles and irritates me in equal measure, “guilty pleasure” is it. I object to neither the pleasure, nor the guilt; it’s the modifying of one by the other that works my nerves, the awkward attempt to elevate as well as denigrate the object to which the phrase is typically assigned.

Guilty pleasures refer to cultural artifacts with mass appeal—genre novels, catchy pop songs, domestic action movies (foreign action “films,” no matter how awful, tend to get a pass), TV shows other than “Breaking Bad” and “The Wire”—that bring with them an easy enjoyment without any pretense to edification. What’s even more perverse is that these so-called “guilty pleasures” never involve actual transgression: the bland escapades of Bridget Jones are a guilty pleasure; the depraved orgies of the Marquis de Sade are not.

“I saw you blush!” Oprah Winfrey said to Cormac McCarthy and grinned, looking happy for the first time during an interview that appeared to be supremely awkward the moment it began. It was the summer of 2007. “The Road,” McCarthy’s post-apocalyptic novel, had been chosen for Oprah’s Book Club, and Winfrey had travelled to Santa Fe to meet the author on his turf. The conversation began inauspiciously enough, with a taciturn McCarthy explaining why this on-camera exchange was a first for him (“I don’t think it’s good for your head”) to an incredulous Winfrey (“Oh, really?”). But then she seized on the novel’s dedication page and, leaning forward, asked gently, “Is this a love story to your son?”

It was the quintessential Oprah moment, the kind that made the Book Club thrive and her critics cringe. She was taking a novel about the end of the world, one that includes an image of a baby roasted on a spit, and making it palatable for talk-show television. I remember watching the interview in the conference room of the monthly magazine where I was working at the time. The staff had made a point to gather and see how a Winfrey-McCarthy interview would play out. One of my colleagues, the one with the most mordant sense of humor, had a phrase at the ready for moments when literature came into direct contact with the demands of TV. “Game over,” he would say, laughing.